For me, it’s a few things.
-
A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush.
-
Support, camaraderie, and kindness, primarily from /r/stopdrinking.
-
Niche stuff, like ideas for local hiking and backpacking trips, propaganda posters, and kayaking info.
A lot of us are still learning, but I think I’m figuring it out here. I was/am on kbin too, but they aren’t federated with anyone so it’s just a reddit clone currently, and it was hard to understand without context.
If you go to magazines and search, you can see some with normal names and some with @ names. The normal named ones are here in Fedia, the @ names are a different instance (Lemmy, Beehaw, kbin when it federated). You can subscribe to communities there and see their content, interact with the users, etc like you would normally. You won’t even be able to really tell the difference.
The part where it differs from reddit is that you will have multiple of the same sub, as each instance grows. Ideally, you would start with an instance you agree with 100%, but that’s not realistic. So as you navogaye the Fediverse (hate that term), you’ll see where you fit in best with instance rules and ideology. Assuming everything is still fairly similar, you would be able to federate with the same instances and still see the same content, but from the instance you choose.
Kbin is federated with Lemmy and other fediverse services, however to stop the Rexxit hug of death, the kbin.social instance of Kbin were forced to temporarily turn on Cloudfare protection which breaks federation. They’re working on it though.
I’m commenting to you through fedia.io currently. It’s a Kbin instance that is federating properly (probably because of the lower traffic levels as compared to kbin.social).
I’m also commenting to you on Fedia! Lol I ended up here because I wasn’t able to understand how this worked on kbin. In due time it won’t matter, and I can decide whether or not kbin or Fedia is the instance for me. I’ll stay here now though as it’ll let me get my feet wet with how this stuff all works.
Are you me? Are we us? Am I you? I’ve got accounts on both and just trying to wrap my head around it.
I’m figuring it out I think. I think my questions now pertain to how the community will be somewhat unified, but I guess that goes against the “spirit” of federated content. The point seems to be to build smaller communities that fit what you want, but at the expense of bulk content. Less users posting more stuff each in more locations.